Here's an Incredible Profile on Sam Hinkie
It took a month for Sports Illustrated’s Chris Ballard to convince Sam Hinkie to allow to him do a profile. Hinkie said yes to that, no to talking to his family and friends, and what we’re left with is an interesting look into the mysterious post-Sixers life of man we barely knew when he was here, less so since he left.
For starters, he’s got a buzzcut and a beard now. He looks kinda tough, like LOST’s John Locke and Ben Linus rolled into one. Like a marketing manager who is surprisingly barrel-chested and also butchers his own meat in his spare time. (As Kyle put it, “HE LOOKS LIKE HACKER IN A FINANCE MOVIE WHO GOT CAUGHT AND WENT TO JAIL AND NOW HE’S OUT.”)
It’s an incredible look at Sam Hinkie the man, as best as you can actually relate to Sam Hinkie the man. There are no bombshells – Hinkie has a non-compete clause until the end of this year which also forbids him from making disparaging remarks about ownership, though he says “I only have good things to say about them anyway” – but what we leave with is a sense of who Sam Hinkie is. Kind of.
There are the quirks you expected, like listening to audiobooks on 3x speed and how his fitbit buzzes every hour to remind him to look back on his last hour and forward to his next one. There are apocalyptic bits that would sound scary if this was a profile on some CEO of an AI company, like:
In particular Hinkie is superfocused on the bots. Which, best as I can tell, are coming for all of our jobs and children. He recommends AI books and articles on how driverless trucks are going to ream the middle class. He asks questions like, “Why are you teaching your kids to type?” (A question worth asking, he argues, because soon enough everything will be voice recognition.) And: “How are you preparing your kids for a life with 60% unemployment?”
There’s a short, “I learned from mistakes” passage in which Hinkie says he probably should have been nicer to agents and definitely could have communicated better. There’s even that profile hallmark: Here’s a story you didn’t know about how great of a person he is. For someone who was often seen as a type of robot, it’s touching:
“Marlene Barnes, the longtime Sixers secretary Hinkie inherited upon arriving…was diagnosed with cancer. Hinkie was one of a handful of people in the organization she told. He arranged for her and her family to take a trip to New York City, to see the musical Hamilton. When Barnes retired last spring, as the cancer advanced, she publicly thanked Hinkie. Two months later, she passed away. Her service ended up being on the day after that of Sixers assistant Sean Rooks, who tragically died from heart disease. Ten people made it to both services to pay their respects. Nine traveled to the services at the team’s expense on a private jet. The other was Hinkie, no longer a Sixers employee, who traveled at his own expense and took a red-eye flight from L.A. to Philly, the only commercial flight that allowed him to be present.”
But Sam Hinkie is still Sam Hinkie, the man who mentions “emotional intelligence and human optimization” when pressed for the next frontier in getting the edge in sports. Hinkie jokes that he’s “like a founder that got pushed out for professional management” in the most in-depth, behind-the-scenes bit the profile has on his Sixers tenure. But that not what it’s about. It’s about a man, glorified and vilified, who is plotting his next move.
Hinkie says he’s still not sure if he’ll return to the NBA when his gap year is up. Ballard swears there are offers. And while Sam bounces in this profile between basketball, robotics, AI, and everything else, basketball is still there. “I think the world probably assumes that I’m recharging and unplugging, and there’s a little of that,” Hinkie told Ballard. “This will get me in trouble if I say it, but I think I’m mostly sharpening the sword to come back.”